Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Bambi and the Busy Weekend

I’m spending a lot of time shooting lately and the volume of images is piling up. I had intended on posting the results of several different shoots, but time is not on my side.

This past Saturday I got up at 3:00 am to drive out to Shenandoah National Park. The Big Meadows area is home to lots of deer and usually the fawns are everywhere, but it seems that this year something is amiss. Some of my friends have been scouting Big Meadows for a week or 2 and have only reported seeing a couple of fawns. In spite of this news, I decided to push on and join members of the Manassas Warrenton Camera Club at dawn. I teamed up with Bill Gercken and we scouted the length of the meadow to no avail. My friend Alan DeFelice was also there and being a natural with wildlife soon found one fawn hiding in the brush. The problem was I could not get an unobstructed view to take a decent shot. Over near the visitor’s center we found one other fawn and actually got to spend some time shooting.

It started to rain by 8:00 am so we decided to pack things up. I headed out to the Shenandoah Valley to continue my work on the Route 11 project. I had a very productive day covering the area between Mount Jackson and Harrisonburg. It rained for the first couple of hours, but afterwards I was rewarded with really great clouds the rest of the day. During the afternoon I decided to reenter the park and shoot the clouds from Blackrock Summit in the southern end of the park. This is a great spot that is a half mile hike from the parking area and offers some of the best views and unique scenery in my opinion.

Sunday morning Duke and I went out for a hike near Old Rag and then worked the back roads of Madison County shooting HDR Infrared. The clouds were quite impressive.